Joseph’s Christmas

Roger Fritts

December 22, 1996

Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church

Bethesda, Maryland

However, as a father I connect more with Joseph than with the other legendary persons in the story of Jesus’ birth. Clearly for many Mary and Jesus fill the roles of perfect, idealized mother and son. Yet the human race also needs dependable people who show up at work, take out the trash, and care for their children. Precocious children may eclipse these good people. Nevertheless, they are a basic part of our social mixture.

Very little information exists about Joseph. The infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke tell us that Mary became engaged to Joseph. He was a carpenter who lived in a small Jewish village called Nazareth, about sixty miles north of Jerusalem. However, before they hadsexual relations, Joseph discovered that Mary was pregnant. She claimed that she was a virgin, but because this was before the development of artificial insemination, Joseph was skeptical. A good man, Joseph did not wish to expose Mary to public disgrace. He planned to break off their engagement quietly. However, just when he had resolved to do this, Joseph had a dream. In this dream a messenger of God surprised him with these words:

Joseph, descendant of David, don’t hesitate to take Mary as your wife, since the holy spirit is responsible for her pregnancy. She will give birth to a son and you will name him Jesus.

Joseph had not read the writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, so he interpreted this dream literally, and decided to stay with Mary. However, he did not have “marital relations” with Mary until after Jesus was born. The traditional infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke give us no more information about Joseph’s life before Jesus’ birth. Luke’s account does say that Mary visited a relative named Elizabeth, an older woman who was pregnant with John the Baptist. We can only speculate that Joseph worked hard as a carpenter, building everything from homes to cribs, so that he could feed his growing family.

According to the traditional story, shortly before the birth of the baby, the Emperor issued a decree that his government take a census of the whole civilized world. Officials ordered everyone to travel to their ancestral city where officials would count them in the census. Joseph’s ancestral home was Bethlehem. So with Mary about nine months pregnant, the young couple traveled to Bethlehem, which is about 70 miles south of the small city of Nazareth.

The only account of the actual birth is in Luke. It consists of about thirty words. Luke wrote:

. . . she gave birth to a son, her first born. She wrapped him in strips of cloth and laid him in amanger or feeding trough, because there was no space for them in the inn.

That is all we know about the birth of Jesus from the traditional account recorded in Luke. There is no mention of any animals. There is no mention of a barn. We only know that they placed the baby in a feeding trough. This detail has led people to jump to the conclusion that the trough was in a barn, and that animals were in the barn watching the birth.

I can only speculate about what the experience must have been like for Joseph. I remember the birth of my own firstborn child. In many ways my experience must have been very different than the experience of a young man two thousand years ago. It is unlikely, for example, that Joseph attended birthing classes with Mary for eight weeks before the birth. I doubt that Joseph practiced relaxation and visualization techniques with Mary. Joseph did not watch hours of video tapes showing other people’s birth experiences. He did not travel with Mary to interview doctors and midwives, or tour hospitals and birthing centers. Mary did not require him to read the chapter on birth in the Our Bodies, Ourselves, as Leslie required me to do.

Yet I suspect that many feelings and thoughts that husbands have as they help their wives go through the experience of giving birth are universal. So perhaps Joseph and I have some things in common.

I remember the amazing experience of watching a child grow inside a woman. I recall the wonderful experience of being able to hold my hand against my wife’s skin and feel the kick of a child. I remember the experience of watching Leslie grow larger and larger. Inside me was an unspoken feeling of relief that I did not have to carry a child for nine months.

However, I also recall wondering what it must be like to carry a new life inside your body. As a man I will never experience anything quite like what women go through.

I remember the intense filling of wanting to provide a home for this new child. Three days before the birth of our first child, I signed a contract to buy my first house. I felt a new responsibility to make sure my job was secure, to fix up the house, to repair the appliances, to wallpaper the baby’s room, and to buy a crib. Perhaps Joseph, being a carpenter, made a crib in Nazareth for the child to sleep in.

I remember the fear of what might go wrong. Would a big snow storm hit just before the birth, making it impossible for us to get to the midwives we had contracted to help us? I bought snow chains for the tires, just in case. Would something go wrong with the pregnancy? I read about miscarriages and tried to prepare myself for that possibility. Would the child be born with physical problems? Again I read about what might go wrong and tried in my mind to prepare myself. I wonder if the young man living two thousand years ago in the Middle East had such thoughts? I suspect that he did.

I remember my concerns about my own ability to be a father. The word “father,” the word “Dad” sounded strange to me, awkward. I did not feel like a father or a dad. Could I handle the responsibility? Would the sound of a crying baby waking up in the middle of the night, night after night, be something I could handle? What is it like to care for a baby? I asked a friend. “You have cared for a dog, haven’t you?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Well, multiply that by ten times and you will have some idea what it is like to care for a baby.” I suspect that the husband of Mary had thoughts like these.

My first son was born nearly fifteen years ago at a hospital in Massachusetts. It was an amazing and tiring experience for me. I remember hugging the two midwives who helped us through and thanking them for their hard work. We do not know if Joseph had the help of midwives.

A few hours after the birth, a member of my congregation died, and I went to the home of his lover and long-time companion. He told me about the life of a man who had served in World War I and lived a discreet life for sixty years as an important lawyer in the community. I saw in less than twelve hours the cycle of birth and death. I suspect that Joseph also had such experiences of seeing both the wonder of birth and the sadness of death.

For our next two children, Leslie decided to become adventurous—they were born at our home in Evanston, Illinois. She had the help of a midwife, a doctor, and me. Without the institution of the hospital around me I felt even more like Joseph, especially when I called the doctor and found out he was on vacation in Wisconsin. However, unlike Joseph, the doctor could give me instructions on his car phone, while he drove to our house. He arrived two hours before the birth of our second child.

After the birth of each of our children, I looked at them and felt that they were the most beautiful babies I had ever seen in the world. I knew rationally that this made no sense. I knew psychologically that it was a sign of extreme narcissism to feel that my babies were the most beautiful babies in the world. Nevertheless whenever I was with them, whenever I held them in my arms and smelled their soft hair and their skin, I was certain that no children had ever been or could ever be more beautiful. I suspect that as a father Joseph had this feeling, also.

What do we know of Joseph after the birth of Jesus? According to the traditional account in Matthew a few days or perhaps weeks after the birth Joseph had another dream in which a messenger from God appeared to him saying:

Get ready, take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt. Stay there until I give you instructions. You see, King Herod is determined to hunt your child down and destroy him.

Joseph took this dream seriously. He took the child and his mother under cover of night and set out for Egypt. There they remained until King Herod’s death. Then Joseph had another dream. This time the messenger in the dream said:

Take the child and his mother, and return to the land of Israel; those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.

Joseph and Mary settled in the village of Nazareth, where they raised Jesus into adulthood.

Only one other reference to Joseph appears. According to Luke, Mary and Joseph:

. . . used to travel the sixty miles south from Nazareth to Jerusalem every year for the Passover festival. When he was twelve years old, they went to the festival as usual. When the festival was over and they were returning home, the young Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, without his parents knowing about it. Assuming that he was in the traveling party, they went a day’s journey, and they began to look for him among their relatives and acquaintances. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him.

. . . after three days it so happened that they found him in the temple area, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who listened to him was astounded at his understanding and his responses.

. . . when his parents saw him they were overwhelmed. “Child,” his mother said to him, “why have you done this to us? Don’t you see? Your father and I have been worried sick looking for you.”

“Why were you looking for me?” he said to them. “Didn’t you know that I have to be in my father’s house?”

But they did not understand what he was talking about.

That is the last we hear about Joseph. Our last vision is of a father confused by the words of his precocious son, a son for whom he frantically searched for three days. As the father of three children, I can imagine the worry and the confusion Joseph might have felt about twelve-year-old Jesus. As Kahlil Gibran said:

“Your children are not your children . . . For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit . . .”

Scholars generally assume that Joseph died before the crucifixion. Today, writers hardly mention Joseph in systematic theologies or in celebrations of Christmas. In our popular culture he exists in the shadow of Mary and Jesus.

Yet as a father I identify more with Joseph than with the other mythical figures of Christmas. Humans beings appear to need mothers and sons whom we can idealize. Mary and Jesus fill those roles for millions of people. However, we humans also need folks who will go to work every day, pay the bills, wash the dishes, and love their children even when they do not fully understand them. They are the people in the background, who are nevertheless an essential part of the human mosaic.

So to this Jewish father of 2,000 years ago I say Merry Christmas! And, at the risk of being politically incorrect, I say Merry Christmas to all the quiet, plodding fathers. Merry Christmas!

Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
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